A Windsor woman and her 64-year-old mom were sentenced Monday to house arrest and probation for going to an Amherstburg bar and leaving a carload of young kids unattended in the parking lot.

Jennifer North, 37, and her mother Patricia went into Shooter’s Roadhouse on July 7. The women left North’s four daughters — aged two to nine — in a parked car outside the bar.

“It was a horrible lack of judgment on her part,” defence lawyer Kevin Shannon, who represented the children’s mother, said Monday after the sentencing hearing. “It is a stupid thing she did and she has learned from it.”

Police were called to the Sandwich Street bar around midnight by a patron who noticed the children alone in the car. The three youngest children were asleep and the nine year old was watching over them.

Their mother had been in the bar for about two hours watching the band.

The grandmother left the children alone for a “significantly” shorter period of time, Shannon said. While her daughter was inside the bar, the grandmother stayed with the children. The grandmother went into the bar to find her daughter, but lingered there while the children were left unattended.

Defence lawyer Brian Dube, who represented the grandmother, painted her as “sympathetic character.” The elderly woman suffers from a learning disability and “significant medical issues.”

He called the event “troubling” but isolated.

“There is no evidence before the court of a history of this particular type of behaviour,” Dube said.

The two women share a home. The mother, who also has a learning disability, has a total of six children and is on social assistance. The biological father of one of the children took all six siblings into his home while police investigated the incident.

The children were returned to the mother a day later.

Both women pleaded guilty to two counts each of abandoning a child. They co-operated with investigators and showed the court proof they have completed a parenting course.

The women are on house arrest for 30 days, after which they will be on probation for three years. Both were ordered to submit blood samples for the national DNA databank police use to solve crime.